Erasure and Seriality: The “Serial Attitude” in <i>A Humument</i> and <i>Tree of Codes</i>

Abstract Seriality can be both an intrinsic logic of a text or an object and the methodology by which said logic is enacted before it is relayed to the viewer/listener/reader. This means that seriality can be used not only to explain the episodic, fragmented, or otherwise temporally lengthened nature of media and art, but also to unpack modes of production and reception that put on display entwined processes of repetition and variation, demanding loyal readership. Focusing on two poetic/artistic works of erasure, i.e., Tom Phillips A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes , I study the particular draft of seriality inherent in erasure arts and literature by narrowing down the focus on what Mel Bochner called ‘the serial attitude’. An understanding of the Bochnerian ‘serial attitude’ as a versioning tool and as what enables erasure in arts and poetry makes evident, I propose, that erasure is a repetitive act of serial layering – where each layer is there exactly because it differs from the previous and the subsequent layers in the semantic labor it is meant to perform and also in the material form it takes.